From the Iras to the Oscars

According to the Oscar historian Damien Bona, at the first Academy Awards, in 1929, the names of the winners were printed on the back of the dinner menu and the awards were “given out in five minutes.” Bona, the co-author, with Mason Wiley, of “Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards,” died last month. The writer-director Bill Condon (who co-produced the 2009 Oscar ceremony), said that Bona “knew more about the history of the awards than anybody I ever met.”

Bona and Wiley (who died in 1994) began their research into the history of the Oscars in 1982. The two men had met while they were students at Columbia University in the seventies. They went on to join an organization known as the Columbia Film Critics Circle, which morphed into the New York Independent Film Critics. “We’re more film nerds than film critics,” Wiley told Mark Singer in a 1980 Talk story. “We’re the sort of people who go to see a film at the Museum of Modern Art and rush to get a seat in the front row.”

The occasion for Singer’s story was the Iras, the annual awards ceremony conducted by the New York Independent Film Critics. (“Independent,” Singer notes, means “that nobody in the organization actually gets paid to utter opinions on the cinema.”) The awards were named after Ira Hozinsky, one of the founding members, who was revered for attending more than two hundred film screenings a year. The fifth annual Iras, which Singer covered, were held in a tavern on 108th Street and probably had more in common with the original Academy Awards dinner—no dance numbers or musical performances—than this Sunday’s extravaganza in Los Angeles will. Like the Oscars, the Iras also had a statuette:

It is a red wooden ashtray with an Art Deco nymph in a come-hither pose perched above the bowl, but it cannot be given away, because no copies of it exist. In any case, the ashtray wasn’t present for the occasion, because Wiley had left it sitting on the mantel in his apartment.

Unlike the Oscars, whose ballots are tabulated by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Iras relied on a less dignified voting system:

The deliberations were statistically complicated and, at moments, ad hominem. When one judge awarded a fifth-place vote for best supporting actor to Ernest Borgnine for his role in “The Black Hole,” (“It’s a sentimental vote,” Wiley explained. “He did it because Borgnine was married to Ethel Merman for about a month and she left him two blank pages in her autobiography”), several of the other critics made derisive remarks and unflattering noises.

The winners in 1980 indicate how idiosyncratic the Iras can be: “Fedora” took best picture; Clint Eastwood (“Escape from Alcatraz”) won best actor; and Blake Edwards was given the best director award for “10.” This year’s Iras have yet to be announced, but you can see the winners of last year’s awards on the They’ll Love It in Pomona blog. Those ceremonies were held in someone’s apartment and, needless to say, Billy Crystal didn’t host.

The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.